Best Color Laserjet?

[marvin]

I am thinking whether to change our printers or not!

 

We have around 10 HP Laserjet 2600n around the school but the toners for these printers are getting more and more expensive!!!

 

Can anyone recommend any good reliable printers that can be connected via ethernet?

 

Also i have had so many problems with these 2600n where they just keep spooling now and then and print the same thing over and over again! According to HP it is a Memory issue as they can only hold 16MB!!!!

[rush_tech]

Toner has gone up for all printers as we found out for our HP printers

[dgsmith]

We've stopped getting OEM cartridges across all our ranges (exceptions are brand new printers and office printers where documents go out externally, as we need that reliability).

 

Our 2600n printers (we also have alot) are some of the least economical, but count the majority of our colour printers overall, so we need alot of stock, and can't afford to run them unless we get compat cartridges.

 

Generally the more you pay for printers the less they cost to run.

[dhicks]

Can anyone recommend any good reliable printers that can be connected via ethernet?

 

We buy refurbished HP 4650s off eBay for around £250 each.

 

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David Hicks

[plexer]

David,

 

Is that via the school paying for them or using a credit card?

 

Any sellers you can recommend?

 

I was thinking of replacing any that need it with 4600's or any other that take the same carts as they are just workhorses.

 

Ben

[LCPSWolf]

Marvin,

 

We pretty much stick with HP's for laser printers due to their reliability (at least that we've seen) so I can't help you much with other recommendations. We had been using some of the Xerox Phaser line but can't say that the toner would be much cheaper.

 

Our high school here has realized that they don't need color lasers in all locations and have been swapping down to a black and white networked laser - cuts costs for toner significantly. I didn't know if that would be an option for you or not, but if so it's the way to go.

 

Best of luck. I'd love to find a cheaper solution than HP that's still solid.

[karldenton]

We use Brother HL4050. We have 6 of them and have no problems. Drum needs replacing after 20,000 pages.

[dhicks]

Is that via the school paying for them or using a credit card?

 

I pay via PayPal, the school gives me a cheque. The school really should figure PayPal out.

 

Any sellers you can recommend?

 

In general, look for multiple machines offered by the same company - there's several places that simply have a warehouse full of printers and they seem to work full time refurbishing them and they know what they're doing. I've recently bought printers off sellers siliconconnect and printermaintenanceuk and had no problems with either.

 

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David Hicks

[User3204]

I'm still resisting colour printers, the staff network has 3, and the student network only have them in Art, Languages and I will be putting a new one into Technology this term. But we've also decided to start charging for colour prints (but not black), so this stops usage.

 

The ones we're going for mostly are the Oki ones, either the 9650 (a3), or the 5650 (a4), you have to buy toners, drums, photoconductors, and the waste toner bottle (which is really annoying) all as seperate items.

[DAckroyd]

we are crrently looking at changing out colour printers with a colour photocopier leased so we just pay 0.5p per page for both A4 and A3 and about £400 per quater iirc - from konica (ESPO)

[Simcfc73]

I dumped ours for k5400's and love them, got about 15 round school now.

[dhicks]

I dumped ours for k5400's and love them, got about 15 round school now.

 

We're sticking with the older Business Inkjet 1100 / 1200 printers for now as we'd already bought several when the K5400s came out and we just want to use one set of ink cartridges. The business inkjets actually work well and have been less trouble than I feared - I've just networked a couple instead of using laser printers. You can replace the print heads should they get bunged up and, again, you can get them second-hand off eBay (as little as £30 if you're lucky).

 

There was a post here, maybe a couple of years ago, from someone grumbling about a new photocopier that had turned up at their school that used ink rather than toner - basically a large inkjet printer with a scanner and controlling PC attached. Anyone remember that, or know how the device is getting on now?

 

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David Hicks

[rh91uk]

We have recently brought one of the Xerox Phaser lines (can't remember which one sorry!) and they have proved to be excellent printers.

[zag]

we are crrently looking at changing out colour printers with a colour photocopier leased so we just pay 0.5p per page for both A4 and A3 and about £400 per quater iirc - from konica (ESPO)

 

From my experience photo copiers are awful at colour printing, so many driver issues and jamming. We gave up with our brand new leased Canon photocopier and went back to laser printers, they were much better in the long run.

[dhicks]

From my experience photo copiers are awful at colour printing, so many driver issues and jamming. We gave up with our brand new leased Canon photocopier and went back to laser printers, they were much better in the long run.

 

That's interesting. We have a Canon colour network printer / photocopier device which, like yours, produces some truly horrible colours at times - it seems okay just after the maintainence chap has been to have a look at it, but quickly drifts off course again (generally towards the purple end of the spectrum - people in photos end up looking like they have scarlet feaver or have been boiled alive). The driver for the machine refuses to accept a colour profile, too. We're currently looking at replacing our leased devices and are looking to get a humungous all-in-one device that can print A4, A3, booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, banknotes, etc.

 

I'd assumed the main problem with our Canon machine was that is was simply getting old and had been over-used - lots of colour devices are designed for "spot" colour, i.e. "business" graphics like the occasional pie chart and so on, not runs of 100 photos at a time to decorate the hall. I rang up the chap who's trying to sell us Ricoh machines to ask about drivers and ICC profiles, and he assured me all that would be fine. We're going to their showroom at some point soon, though, so I'll make sure and double check when I'm there.

 

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David Hicks

[Geoff]

From my experience photo copiers are awful at colour printing, so many driver issues and jamming. We gave up with our brand new leased Canon photocopier and went back to laser printers, they were much better in the long run.

 

Thou shalt always specify the optional postscript module.

[dhicks]

Thou shalt always specify the optional postscript module.

 

Why? What's inherently better about Postscript than PCL? Can we get the same results by using Ghostscript on the print server instead of paying £800 for the Postscript module?

 

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David Hicks

[Geoff]

Well you could ask HP.

 

HP Printers and HP Plotters - PostScript ® / PCL Comparison - bpo00141 - HP Business Support Center

 

Can we get the same results by using Ghostscript on the print server instead of paying £800 for the Postscript module?

 

If your ghostscript drivers for the photocopier are better than the windows PCL ones then yes. This would be a sensible solution. Although not everyone has a Linux Print Server!

[sidewinder]

We've recently changed from buying HP 2600's to Brother HL4050's.

Apart from the drum needing replacement the Brothers seem a lot more reliable to me. Have a lot of problems with the 2600's, mostly them randomly losing all network settings and reverting to DHCP

[meastaugh1]

I dumped ours for k5400's and love them, got about 15 round school now.

 

Have you got any K8600s? We did used to use Business Inkjet 2800 but they continually had paper (mis)feed problems? Just wondering what A3 paper feed experience on the k8600 is like. Thanks.

[dhicks]

We did used to use Business Inkjet 2800 but they continually had paper (mis)feed problems?

 

We got a 2800 for printing A3 but it conked out after a few months - I think a sensor in the lid broke, so it thought the lid was always open even when it was closed. This might have been simply down to rough handling (it used to sit on the desk in the front office), so these printers might simply be a bit on the delicate side.

 

Just wondering what A3 paper feed experience on the k8600 is like.

 

I have one of these with a continuous ink system fitted, I use it to print full-page borderless A3 and A4 photos. Oddly, A3 is fine, with the paper being easy to simply slide in the printer. A4 paper, however, has to be lined up slighty to the left of where you'd think it would go, which is fiddly. I've also recently found the paper pick-up rollers are starting to get clogged (I think it's china clay or silica from the photo paper) and not pick up paper. This can be fixed by applying WD40 to the paper pick-up rollers, but I'd prefer a printer that just worked properly.

 

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

Well you could ask HP.

 

Thanks for the link. I didn't know PCL was an HP invention. I still have no idea why colour reproduction would be "better" with Postscript than with PCL, though. Do I need to do something more involved than print a test page from the printer, send it off to a lab to be examined with a coloromiter and get an ICC profile sent back, apply that ICC profile to the printer via the "colour management" tab on the printer's "properties" dialog, then calibrate some monitors with a Pantone Huey or similar? Surely that should make sure that the colours we see on screen are the same that come out of the printer, or am I missing some part of the problem?

 

If your ghostscript drivers for the photocopier are better than the windows PCL ones then yes.

 

I wasn't planning to use Ghostscript as a driver as such, I was simply going to have it installed on the Server 2003 machine ready to interpret Postscript coming from any redirected ports and print it to the appropriate Windows printer, i.e. I was going to use Ghostscript to provide a generic postscript printer as a front-end to any printers we need to print to from something that can only print to Postscript printers (stuff running on Linux machines). I'm not planning to have a Linux-based print server, or at least if we do then all it will be doing is taking Postscript files and passing them to the Windows server to be printed.

 

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David Hicks

[rh91uk]

We've recently changed from buying HP 2600's to Brother HL4050's.

 

A vote for the brother's here. Apart from the sometimes shortage of toners - they have been really reliable printers.

 

(well, we dont have that particular model - but we do have quite a few Brother printers stacked around that never give us any grief!).

 

The best color laserjets WERE the Tally Genicoms but sadly their out of business now